IN

THE
RUINS
OF
THE
PRESENT

Tricontinental Working Document, no. 1

March 2018
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 In the Ruins of the
Present
Vijay Prashad.
Ağaca balta vurmuşlar ‘sapı bendendir’ demiş.
When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: the
handle is one of us.
(Turkish proverb).
Raoul Peck, the Haitian filmmaker, opens his film –
Der Junge Karl Marx (2017) – in the forests of Prussia.
Peasants gather fallen wood. They look cold and
hungry. We hear horses in the distance. The guards and
the aristocrats are near. They have come to claim the
right to everything in the forest. The peasants run. But
they have no energy. They fall. The whips and lances
of the aristocrats and the guards strike them. Some of
the peasants die. Even fallen wood is not allowed to
them.
Young Karl Marx, sitting in Cologne in 1842, is
dismayed at the violence against the German peasants.
The peasants, he wrote, know the punishment. They
are being beaten, even killed. But what they do not
know is the crime. For what crime are they being
punished?
Peck is clever to open his film with this dilemma,
for it is the question that every sensitive person
should ask today. What is the crime for which the
world’s poor are being punished? Poverty and war
produce refugees of hunger and bombardment, but
they are denied mobility, denied any exit from their
predicament. They know the punishment that
they face: indignity, starvation and death. This
they know. What they do not know is their crime.
What have they done to deserve this?
The Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz
visited Haiti after the devastating earthquake of
2010. In a memorable essay titled ‘Apocalypse’,
Junot Diaz noted that Haiti warned us of the new
‘zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations
are being rendered through economic alchemy
into not-quite-alive. In the old days, a zombie was
a figure whose life and work had been captured
Working Document, No. 1
by magical means. Old zombies were expected to
work around the clock with no relief. The new
zombie cannot expect work of any kind – the new
zombie just waits around to die’.
And the new zombie cannot be allowed to forage
for food or to seek shelter or medicine. The new
zombie, truly, must just wait to die. This is the
punishment. But what is the crime?
5
 Part 1: Structure.
International
Division of Humanity
Aadmi tha, bari mushqil se insaan hua.
We were people. With great difficulty we became human.
­—Akbar Illahabadi.
US President Donald Trump threatens to annihilate
North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. This is the new Axis
of Evil, a concept his predecessor George W. Bush
used in 2002 but that then did not include Venezuela.
It included Iraq, which the United States bombed
in 2003 as part of its illegal invasion of the country.
Since then, the US has also destroyed Libya and other
countries that include Haiti, now substantially under
US and UN occupation. Like a wounded dragon,
the United States whips its tail across the planet
and breathes fire on people – destroying countries,
vanquishing its enemies. Its wounds are not fatal, but
strategic. The United States still possesses the most
powerful military in the world and is capable of
destroying any country by aerial bombardment
and by the use of weapons of mass destruction.
But it uses this power in ways that do not always
benefit its ambitions. Because the United States
is the most powerful country in the world does
not make it godlike; it has its own errors, which
are to be carefully tracked by those who favour
humanity over submission.
There is iron in the soul of imperialism. It uses
its immense military power against human beings
and then – conveniently – forgets the human cost
of suffering that follows. There has never been any
accountability for the use of nuclear weapons on
Japan in 1945 nor for the hideous bombardment of
Korea in the 1950s nor the massive bombardment
of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s nor indeed the
endless war on Afghanistan and the destruction
of Iraq and Libya. The iron is so lodged in the soul
that there is barely any concern when the United
States drops a massive bomb on Afghanistan. The
local authorities – pushed by the United States
and the Afghan government – declined to allow
journalists into the site on the grounds of security.
When the people around the bombsite spoke,
their words were chilling. ‘The earth felt like a
boat in a storm’, said Mohammed Shahzad. ‘It felt
like heaven was falling’. Achin’s mayor – Naveed
Shinwari – reflected, ‘There is no doubt that
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ISIS was brutal, and that they have committed
atrocities against our people. But I don’t see why
the bomb was dropped. It terrorised our people.
My relatives thought the end of the world had
come’.
This feels like the era of annihilation, when the
world seems poised at the brink of capitalist-
induced planetary climate chaos and of nuclear
war.
7
It is fitting, therefore, to pause and register the
grave words of those who have already experienced
annihilation – the survivors of the US use of weapons
of mass destruction against Japan. Torako Hironaka,
who survived the US atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima
made a list in her diary of what she recalled,
1. Some burned work clothes.
2. A naked woman.
3. Naked girls crying ‘Stupid America’.
4. A field of watermelons.
5. What with dead cats, pigs and people, it was
just a hell on earth.
In his Hiroshima Diary (1955), written in the aftermath
of the nuclear attack, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya wrote,
Those who were able walked silently towards the
suburbs in the distant hills, their spirits broken,
their initiative gone. When asked whence they
had come, they pointed to the city and said,
‘That way’, and when asked where they were
going, pointed away from the city and said, ‘This
way’. They were so broken and confused that
they moved and behaved like automatons. Their
reactions had astonished outsiders, who reported
with amazement the spectacle of long files of
people holding stolidly to a narrow, rough path
when close by was a smooth, easy road going in
the same direction. The outsiders could not grasp
the fact that they were witnessing the exodus of
people who walked in the realm of dreams.
The words of the hibakusha, the survivors of the
nuclear attack, are essential for our times, when it
appears that annihilation is on the horizon. These
are warnings against complacency. They provide the
warmth of human survival against the harshness of
iron and hatred.
Catastrophic natural events – hurricanes and
rising sea levels – capture our imagination, as the
Caribbean islands are wracked by wind and flood
and as the South Sea islands disappear into the
oceans. Water drowns land as capital drowns the
dreams of human survival. Data from international
agencies show us that formal employment is an
impossible dream for millions of our fellows on
the planet. There is, however, always a job with the
military. Wars continue endlessly. Pitiless futures
stand before the young. Their trust in humanity
is fragile.
There is an international division of humanity. It
is as if there is wall that separates our humanity;
those who live in zones of great war and tragedy
are separated from those who live with the illusion
of peace, in countries that produce the conditions
for war but deny that they have a hand in it.
How to understand a world of unemployment
and annihilation, of poverty, climate catastrophe
and war? What concepts do we have to grasp these
complex realities? The modes of thought that
come from North American positivism – game
theory, regression analysis, multi-level models,
inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general
theory of our condition. Seeped in common sense
understandings of power and naive about the role
of elites in our world, these approaches might
Working Document, No. 1
explain this or that aspect of our world.
But can they explain the relationship between
the endemic crisis produced by globalisation,
the failure of neoliberalism to manage this crisis
and the emergence of neofascism as its current
consensus? Do they have the concepts – such as
imperialism – that are essential to an investigation
of the real world that we live in and not the
illusory world dreamt up by the first principles
of bourgeois social science? Can we understand
9
why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
wants to bomb this country or why the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) wants to extract its pound of
Globalisation
flesh from that country? Do they have an explanation
for why the countries of the world spend more money
on the arsenal of repression than on the production of
social goods, why there are more police on our streets
than social workers and artists?

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More

than one starving soul would like to know.
—Eduardo Galeano.

The concept used to explain the desiccation of

social life across the planet is neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is essentially a policy platform
designed by multinational agencies such as
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank as well as by intellectuals who
circle these institutions. These intellectuals have

Working Document, No. 1

absorbed the bourgeois logic that it is corporate
ingenuity that makes history rather than the
social labour of human beings. It is corporations,
they say, that make jobs, and so therefore to make
an economy hum one has to cater to the needs of
the corporations. The motor of history is seen to
be Capital – corporations and entrepreneurs. It
is not seen to be social labour – the workers who
design our future and whose hard work produces
the commodities that enhance our present.

11
Scholars critical of the neoliberal policy slate turn
to the projects of the UK’s Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and the US President Ronald Reagan to
explain how neoliberalism changed the world. It
is as if these leaders were like sorcerers, conjuring
up public policy as if from no-where, driving their
agenda through the institutions of the planet. They
championed the privatisation of the protected
commons and the cannibalisation of social resources.
That is indeed the case. But why? Why did they move
towards privatisation and cannibalisation?
An idealist approach to human history is not
adequate. Neoliberalism did not appear out of thin
air. It was brought to bear by these governments to
solve practical problems produced by structural
changes in the global mode of production. Capitalism
has always sought a global market, eager to break free
of the limits set upon it by national governments,
eager to find new resources and new techniques
to produce goods for lower costs and to find new
markets to sell these goods at higher prices. But
capital’s great global ambitions were held in check
by technological limitations – such as the inability to
access information in real time from across the planet
– and by working-class movements that demanded
that nation-states restrict capital to benefit labour.
But by the 1970s, certain technological barriers had
been overcome and working-class power had been
relatively depleted. Capital was now able to ascend its
chariot and observe the planet from above, looking
down at it from its satellites, hoarding information on
its computers and seeking the cheapest workers and
the dearest markets. This god-like position for capital
inaugurates the era of globalisation.
A truly magical era opened up for capital. Technological
developments came swiftly as a flood of workers
marched in single-file towards its global factories,
and as a new intellectual property regime developed
to protect capital’s gains despite political objections
from weakened states around the world. What
state power workers and peasants had was now
delivered comprehensively to capitalists. Now
truly one could say that the state functions as a
committee for managing the common affairs of
the bourgeoisie.
The political condition for globalisation was set
by the Western financial system’s induced debt
crisis for the Third World. A sharp increase in US
interest rates in 1979 – the Volcker Shock (named
after US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker) –
jolted the economies of the Third World. What
Volcker did by his monetary policy was to export
inflation from the shores of the United States to
the rest of the world. High interest rates for the
dollar meant that the London Inter-Bank Offer
Rate (LIBOR) skyrocketed. For no fault of their
own, Third World states now found themselves
at catastrophic levels of debt against commercial
banks and Western governments. The situation
of the fifteen heavily indebted countries (based
on the World Bank’s assessment) is illustrative.
In 1970, these fifteen countries carried a total
external public debt of $17.9 billion (9.8% of their
Gross National Product, GNP). By 1987 – in the
heat of the debt crisis – the figure rose to $402.2
billion (47.5% of their GNP). The debt service or
interest payments on this loan was monumental
– from a high payment of $2.8 billion (1970), it
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rose to an unmanageable $36.3 billion (1987). By
1991, the numbers had gone out of control. The
total external debt for the Third World states
was at $1.4 trillion, which amounted to 126.5% of
the total exports of these countries. This means
that the amount owed to commercial banks and
governments was greater than the amount earned
by the export of goods and services.
The Third World debt crisis crushed the ability
of these states to provide social goods to their
13
populations. UNICEF – the UN Children’s Agency
– noted that this debt crisis resulted in a 25% drop
in average incomes in the 1980s, a lost decade. The 37
poorest countries in the world reduced their spending
per capita on health by 25% and on education by 50%.
UNICEF’s interest was in the children. It estimated
that in 1988 half a million children died of preventable
ailments as a result of the debt crisis. That means,
UNICEF noted, that 40,000 children died every
day because of the financial system. At this time,
Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere put it clearly,
‘Must we starve our children to pay our debts?’.
The debt crisis in the Third World had destroyed the
political confidence of many of the states in Africa,
Asia and Latin America – which meant that they
had little to bargain with when companies arrived to
negotiate for ‘free trade zones’ and other advantages.
It was the debt crisis that weakened the bargaining
power of the post-colonial states, weakening their
leaders’ resolve and the cultural confidence of the
nationalist elites. Dependence is a consequence of
a lack of independence. ‘He who feeds you’, warned
Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara,‘controls you’. So it
has become.
It was on the graves of these children and on the
weakness of the Third World states that the new
architecture of globalisation would be built. There
were three elements to this new dynamic: the
development of new technologies, the delivery
of millions of new workers to the accumulation
strategies of the monopoly firms and the creation of a
new intellectual property regime.
First, new technologies – such as satellite
communications, computerisation and container
ships – provided firms with the ability to manage
global, real-time databases and to move goods as
fast as possible. Firms could break-up factories and
set them up in several countries at the same time – a
process known as the disarticulation of production.
Each factory could produce one part of the final
commodity, with the firm able – thanks to detailed
information held on its proprietary database – to
judge which country would be best able to provide
the cheapest location for which production need.
Capital did not need to build factories near
markets or to build one giant factory. Those days
were over. Now capital could take advantage of
small changes in prices of input costs to build
smaller factories in many locations. Because of
advances in transportation – containerisation,
for instance – capital could move the parts of the
commodity swiftly and relatively cheaply as well
as shift commodities to markets with relative ease.
The technological means to remove production
from one territory and to spread production
across the planet now became available.
Second, barriers erected by the October
Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the
Third World Project began to tumble in the 1980s
because of the Third World debt crisis, the fall of
the USSR and the opening of the Chinese labour
market to foreign capital. Millions of workers,
previously sheltered from full-scale capitalist
demands, now became prey to the capitalist
market. They would await the disarticulated
factory to descend into their lives.
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Thirdly, capital went into the final round of
the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs
(GATT)’s Uruguay Round from 1986 to 1994 to
ensure that intellectual property rights would
be in the hands of capital rather than society.
Previously, intellectual property was vested in the
process by which a good was produced, not in the
good itself. That allowed people to find new ways
to make goods and to therefore enhance science
and technology. Reverse engineering of goods was
possible, which was crucial to the pharmaceutical
15
sector in the poorer nations where they could develop
life-saving medicines for the poor. After the final
round of GATT, which produced the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) in 1994, the idea of intellectual
property changed. Now, the good itself was to be
patented, which means that capital can collect rent
from anyone who makes this good – regardless of their
own innovations. It also means that the value of goods
produced outside the core territory of capital – North
America and Western Europe – will be protected by
this new intellectual property regime. Furthermore,
the new intellectual property framework – through
the patenting of nanotechnologies, genomics and
transgenics – provided major food corporations with
new power over agriculture that transcended control
over land. It also provided ‘information firms’ with
the basis for the new drive to ‘digital colonisation’ –
namely the theft of data by large ‘information firms’
towards the consolidation of new desires through new
means of consumer surveillance and by the delivery of
mainly Western content to people across the planet
(the slow death of ‘net neutrality’ as a principle
for a social Internet is another indicator of digital
colonisation). This was the new legal framework of
the architecture of disarticulated production.
The World Trade Organisation came about as a result
of a so-called ‘Grand Bargain’, as the economist Omar
Dahi put it. Most of the global South, crippled by the
debt crisis, gave up its industrial policy and protection
of its workers and markets in return for exporting its
agriculture and its extracted raw materials. In reality,
what was lost was economic sovereignty in both
industry and agriculture.
These technological developments, the delivery of
millions of potential workers and the new intellectual
property rules allowed firms to operate on a global
scale. They used two different strategies along the
global commodity chain for the production of goods
and services. First, they moved their entire production
processes overseas to one country. This is known
as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) outsourcing.
Here, the multinational firm would still have to
invest money elsewhere to build up the physical
infrastructure for production. Second, to produce
their commodities the multinational firms would
merely hire subcontractors, who would struggle
against each other in a race to the bottom. This
‘arms-length outsourcing’ – as political economist
John Smith put it – allowed multinational firms
to save their capital and to bear almost no risk
in the production process. Either way – by FDI
or by arm-length outsourcing – capital found
its advantage in labour arbitrage, using cheaper
and weaker labour to make its products, while
hollowing out societies in the North and the
South.
This new geography of production weakens
the power of workers by removing the two
institutional frameworks for the building of
worker power – trade unions and nationalisation.
How can workers build unions in these arms-
length sub-contracted firms that are run on low
margins by owners who use every brutal means
to extract work from replaceable workers? How
can states, if they are taken over by workers,
nationalise parts of the production process if
they do not control the entire process of the
production of a commodity? Neither of these
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means is available to workers. Their own motion
to change the world is stifled by the concentration
camp features of the Export Processing Zones and
by the maquiladora factories.
Arms-length outsourcing enables firms of the
North to no longer invest their capital into the
production process. Nike, Apple and others
like them do not invest money into factories.
They are brand firms. The profits they make
from the rent they collect against their brand
17
is astronomical – and it does not get substantially
reinvested into productive enterprises. Little wonder
that firms are sitting on vast amounts of cash or that
they have turned over mountains of capital into the
unproductive financial casino. Rather than invest this
money for productive enterprises or for the social
good, they hoard it in financial circuits where they
attempt to produce more money from money without
the intermediation of production. No surprise then
that the people who control some of these large firms
become obscenely wealthy. Eight men, says an Oxfam
study, now hold as much wealth as the entire bottom
half of humanity. Their wealth is a direct result of the
arms-length outsourcing established by disarticulated
production and by the ballooning financial sector as a
result of the lack of need to invest in production.
Not only have the rich and corporations amassed
vast amounts of cash, but they have also been – over
the past forty years – stingy with that money. North
American corporations – by themselves – are holding
$1.9 trillion in cash within the US and an additional
$1.1 trillion in their offshore accounts. US banks are
holding $1 trillion in cash reserves. That’s a total of
$4.0 trillion. Add in the cash held by corporations
and banks in Europe and Japan and the total amounts
to $7.3 trillion, a number that does not include the
‘black money’ hoarded in Luxembourg, Singapore,
Switzerland and other such banking havens. That
figure – according to a study by the National Bureau
of Economic Research and based on numbers from the
Bank for International Settlements – indicates that
tax havens hold an estimated $5.6 trillion (in 2007).
Offshore wealth – held in these havens – amounts
to about 10% of total global GDP. In some countries
(such as the UAE), the offshore wealth is above 70% of
GDP. The elites of the UAE, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia,
Russia and Argentina make their countries the
highest states with offshore wealth as a percentage of
GDP. This vast hoard of accumulated money capital
means that the richest firms and individuals have
outsourced stagnation into the heart of the world
– they have refused to invest this cash into the
world of social labour, while they insist on cuts to
national budgets paid for by taxes on workers and
peasants and lower living standards for workers
and peasants. There is no greater scandal than this
structural constipation of capital, this ‘investment
strike’.
Based on this grim reality, it is necessary to
develop – in our common sense language – the
concept of the ‘tax strike’. Those who hold capital,
who are the masters of property, have been –
essentially – on strike against regimes of taxation.
They use their vast wealth to either hide their
money or change tax laws to offer them increasing
protections. This vast pool of wealth is not used
substantially in any productive way. If it is used,
it is put to work to inflate the stock market and
various asset bubbles. The most obscene version
of this use of capital is in the centre of finance:
in Wall Street. The turbulence that this dynamic
can produce was shown in the 2007-08 explosion
of the largest asset bubble to burst as of yet – the
US housing market. In the heyday of the housing
boom, the US government’s delivery of liquidity
to banks was called the Greenspan Put – the US
Federal Reserve’s chair was famous for flooding
the markets with capital, which was used to inflate
asset bubbles such as housing prices. Without any
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real social security or pension scheme, retirement
for older middle-class US residents had come to be
premised on increased home prices. This was the
main asset, so the country’s middle class acceded
willingly to the Greenspan Put and cheered on
finance to develop out of control for their own
short-term benefit. This is what Greenspan’s Put
enabled – the North American Dream for the
middle-class and upper levels of the working-class
was now cemented in the foundations of rising
property prices.
19
If housing prices provided the US middle class and
upper sections of the working class with the dream
of retirement, credit from banks allowed them to
consume at rates that were far above their own
incomes. The United States market operates as the
‘buyer of last resort’ for the world market, continuing
to vacuum up goods and services as well as resources
of all kinds from across the planet. The scale of US
consumption is astronomic. Merely 5% of the world’s
population, the US consumes at least a quarter of
its energy. If everyone on the planet lived like a US
resident, then at least four Earths would be needed
to sustain that level of consumption. The scale of
consumption, fuelled by the Greenspan Put and by
credit delivered through the international banking
system, allows the US consumer to become essential
to the manufacturers from China to Mexico. So the
inflation of the asset markets and the entry of cheap
credit into the US consumer sector is not irrational
for this system, but perfectly rational. The system is
designed in this way, its rationality driving the system
from one crisis to another, from chaos to chaos.
When the US housing market – an overinflated
bubble – burst, Greenspan, one of America’s leading
monetarist practitioners, said he was ‘shocked’. When
Greenspan came before the US Congress in 2008, he
faced sharp questions from Representative Henry
Waxman (California):
Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the
self-interest of organisations, specifically banks
and others, were such as that they were capable
of protecting their own shareholders and their
equity in the firms.
Waxman: In other words, you found that your
view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it
was not working.
Greenspan: Absolutely, precisely. You know that’s
precisely the reason I was shocked, because I
have been going for forty years or more with
very considerable evidence that it was working
exceptionally well.
Greenspan’s ideology, his theory, was flawed, and
he was shocked – and yet it had no impact on the
Economics profession or on their public policy
frameworks. Monetarism came out of this crisis
unscathed. Macro-economic policy remained in
the hands of technocrats who pushed the view that
there need not be any political discussion about
their choices. They were above politics, in the
land of theory, a theory that Greenspan himself
had told the US Congress had been wrong. The
former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis
said quite clearly, ‘The danger of a coup these days
comes not from a tank, but from a bank’. No need
for a military coup (except in certain countries)
when the well-paid lobbyists and the well-behaved
bankers tied democracy up in chains.
The tax strike enabled individuals to hold large
– unimaginable – quantities of social wealth.
This wealth, beyond what an individual or a
family could consume, created the morbid cult
of philanthropy. Rich donors became the hero of
our times, with Bill Gates lionised for his work
on medicine and with other wealthy men and
women seen as champions against poverty. It was
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these individuals who became key drivers of social
policy against the democratically produced needs
of a country. In this way, public policy is now
driven less by democratic institutions and more
by donor-driven agendas. As Sarah Mukasa of the
African Feminist Forum put it, ‘We must caution
against attempts to de-politicise economics and
development and prevent this [new development]
agenda from being completely donor-driven’.
Tax strikes come alongside the insistence from the
21
official policy makers (backed by the full force of big
capital) that public officials must balance the books
of public finances. Governments must balance their
Neoliberalism
budgets, even as capital reduces its payments into
the public exchequer. This means that governments
are forced to either sell assets to raise funds so as to
continue to maintain social institutions or else they
slice away at these social goods. Fiscal responsibility
alongside the tax strike means impoverished
government finances. No wonder then that the
pressure on society is now defrayed from the state
onto society. What the hidden hand destroyed, the
hidden heart had to hold together – the social costs
of globalisation frayed society, whose loose bonds had
to be held together by triple time labour mainly from
women in families.

A philosophy of a hopeless society,

Man eat man, man can’t plan
Whiteman society IMF and subsidies,
and like beggars we continue to stretch our hands.
—Kalamashaka, Ni Wakati.

Modern states, with commitments won by their

population through sustained struggle, could not
immediately cut all social benefits. Childcare,
education, transportation, fresh air, welfare,
pensions: all these the people had forced their
states to provide. These were part of the minimum

Working Document, No. 1

definition of modern civilisation. It is the tax
strike, fiscal responsibility and the demands
from the public for social goods that produced
neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, in other words, was
a product of a bourgeois public policy solution to
the crisis of globalisation.

The tax as well as investment strike and fiscal

responsibility desiccated public budgets.
Bourgeois governments simply could not find the
means to deliver upon their obligations. Dearly

23
won public assets and non-commodified parts of
nature went on the auction block. This privatisation
raised funds to maintain the tenuous finances of the
modern states. International entities such as the IMF
and commercial banks punished states that did not cut
deep enough into their public finances, downgrading
their bonds, preventing them from raising short-
term capital to protect them from the spiral into
insolvency. The gatekeeping by western institutions
against the ‘developing nations’ is now well known.
A World Bank report from 2007 found that by the
end of the previous year ‘only 86 developing countries
have been rated by the rating agencies. Of these, 15
countries have not been rated since 2004. Nearly 70
developing countries have never been rated’. In other
words, the private ratings agencies – Fitch, Moodys
and Standard & Poors – ignore these countries and
thereby make it hard for them to raise capital in
commercial markets. It is the IMF that rates these
countries, often adversely, making money expensive
for them. Not only do these countries lose out because
their GDP is under-reported (since they export
valued commodities at low prices, which are marked
up when they enter the imperialist zone), but they
are also prejudiced against because they are seen as
high-risk borrowers. This is the finance-development
trap, where nations that are poor in capital are forever
fated to remain so. Fire sale of their national assets is
seen as the only way to contain their haemorrhaging
national budgets.
The money raised from privatisation continues to
be used to service debt obligations as well as to pay
for expensive energy imports. This is money that
does not provide new infrastructure or enhance the
social wealth; it is rarely used to invest in education
to broaden the skills of the population. This is –
essentially – a form of theft. A recent study by Global
Financial Integrity and the Centre for Applied
Research (Norwegian School of Economics) found
that the total aid, investment and income that entered
the developing countries from outside in 2012
amounted to $1.3 trillion. That is a great deal of
money. But then, the study looked at the outflow
from the developing world that same year and
found that the number is $3.3 trillion. In other
words, the developing world haemorrhaged $2
trillion to the West. Since 1980, the total drain of
wealth has amounted to $16.3 trillion. The richer
nations, like vampires, have been sucking dry the
wealth of the poorer nations – not during the era
of high colonialism – as did happen – , but in
our contemporary period. What is the character
of this money that flees the developing world?
It comes in three packets – $4.2 trillion in debt
service (almost four times the total aid package),
income made by foreign firms that is repatriated
back to the Global North and unregulated and
illegal capital flight (not just ‘black money’ but
also trade misinvoicing, which itself amounted
to $700 billion in capital loss). For the Global
South, then, funds for basic social development
are simply not easily available.
Matters are no easier in the Global North, where
the State’s neoliberal obligations has driven social
development into the private sector. In fact, the
experience of neoliberal policy in the Global
North has steadily gone global. Tax cuts for the
wealthy and lax restrictions on corporations to
repatriate profits into the territories where they
Working Document, No. 1
are registered have decreased the assets in national
budgets. Enormous expenditure on militaries
and on security services dig into the wells of the
national treasury. Money is not turned over for
essential social services – education and health
care. It then becomes the private obligation of
citizens to find means to pay for what should be a
social function. As a result personal debt increases
when citizens study and when they fall ill. Young
people and cashiered older workers are forced
to pay for their education through debt, as this
25
education was promised as the avenue for individual
advancement. Student loan debt in the United States
is now $1.3 trillion, in the United Kingdom $500
billion. This model of the privatisation of social goods
has been rapidly exported into the rest of the world.
Student debt is on the rise from China to South
Africa, from India to Mexico. In the United States,
85% of the population has some health insurance and
yet – in 2012 – US residents spent $2.7 trillion on
health care out of their own pockets. One study from
2010 showed that 40% of US residents had trouble
paying their medical bills. Medical debt is the main
reason for individuals in the United States to declare
bankruptcy. This ‘American model’ of privatisation
has resulted in a rise in global bankruptcy through
health care bills. In India, the World Bank and the
World Health Organisation found that 52.5 million
Indians were impoverished by health care costs in 2011.
Each year, the World Bank and WHO show, about a
hundred million people go into ‘extreme poverty’ as
a result of health care costs. The number rises to 180
million people per year if the threshold is lifted for
extreme poverty from $1.90 or less per day to $3.10 per
day as income.
Free university education – a major gain for social
democracy – is being gradually whittled away across
the world. College debt suffocates the ability of
students to experiment with new ideas. They are eager
to find courses that would enhance their ability to
find a high paying job once they graduate. To this end
they spend their time finding wage-less internships,
whose growth has been astronomic over the past two
decades. Students seek out ‘coaching’ classes to help
them with their English, get them into expensive
private graduate schools and hope against hope that
the investment in them will pay off with jobs that are
increasingly not available. This means that courses that
challenge the prevailing social order or that introduce
students to innovative thinking (whether in the arts
or sciences) seem less attractive. College becomes
less a social incubator and more a springboard to
individual success – not driven by cupidity but
by debt-induced desperation. This has an impact
on intellectual life in general. ‘Once upon a time’,
Professor Issa Shivji of the University of Dar es
Salaam said, ‘our universities took pride in being
centres of controversy; now we covet to become
centres of excellence. You can’t attain excellence
if you are controversial’. In other words, the
discourse of ‘excellence’ sucks the energy out of
new thinking, especially elaborations of counter-
hegemonic thought rooted in the experiences of
workers, peasants and the unemployed.
How was the economy to grow? Neoliberal
policy bet on letting loose the animal spirits of
consumerism, paid for through debt, and from
the creation of new technologies and assets that
would miraculously increase growth rates and
produce social wealth that could be – somehow
– spent on social goods. None of this happened.
Instead, consumerism and the emergence of new
technologies led to debt and the inflated assets
led to more turbulence of the global economy, a
derivative civilisation, a civilisation founded on
trickery and theft. To make the economy grow,
ordinary people had to go into debt.
Debt is one part of the plan to keep the economy
humming, to make sure that the overabundance
Working Document, No. 1
of products finds a buyer. The proliferation of
advertising to create new desires is evident in
the visual landscape that surrounds us. Firms
have developed sophisticated theories of market
segmentation to target more finely grained desires
and to produce subcultures of consumption.
Demand is created for goods that are either
not essential or that are new versions of older
products that do not need to be replaced (such as
the requirement to get new phones or new cars).
This drive for planned obsolescence certainly
27
helps a saturated market expand, but at the same time
it creates enormous volumes of waste. The world’s
annual garbage production, according to a World
Bank study, amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes of waste,
namely around 11 million tonnes of garbage a day.
It has been estimated that 99% of what is purchased
is thrown away within six months. The World Bank
study shows that by 2025, the total daily garbage will
likely triple and that by 2100, the total annual waste
would exceed 4 billion tonnes. Since 1950, the world
has generated 9 billion tons of plastic waste – only 9%
of which gets recycled. The mirror image of planned
obsolescence to expand the shrinking market is
the mountains of waste that find their home at the
bottom of the seabed, as toxic gases after incineration
and in landfills that leach into precious drinking
water and onto fertile land. The volume of garbage
and the destruction of nature are slowly eroding the
ability of capitalism to gallop forward into its own
version of Nirvana.
More than an economic policy, neoliberalism
functioned as a desirable cultural agenda. The promise
of a world of commodities is the lure of neoliberal
policy. But beneath that is a call to live one’s life as if
one is not a human being but a business enterprise.
The sensibility of an enterprise culture or a culture of
entrepreneurism attracts people of all backgrounds,
but – as a great deal of psychological research shows –
it impacts upon human beings divergently. Those with
fewer resources are not so easily able to flourish in a
world of self-improvement and self-motivation, to be
able to live with the assumption of being a self-driven
individual in world where success is premised upon
background and on chance. Depression and insecurity
are the outcome of a society that is increasingly driven
by a quixotic drive for immediate success premised
on individual talent or drive. Failure is a cost that is
borne individually. ‘The psychic life of neoliberalism’,
as sociologist Christina Scharff put it, damages not
only society but human personality. It undermines
cultures of solidarity in favour of cultures of
consumerism and cultures of individualism –
leading, in sum, to greater dispersed anxiety and
less social cohesion. To put the point sharply, the
World Health Organisation has suggested that
in the past 45 years, suicide rates have increased
by 60%. Suicide is now, as the WHO has pointed
out, among the three leading causes of death
among those men and women aged 15 and 44.
The ideology of neoliberalism, seductive as it
might be, has harsh effects in an unequal society,
particularly amongst the youth.
The data on the poverty of our times is utterly
miserable. Let’s begin with the fact that 22,000
children die everyday from poverty. Every ten
seconds a child dies of hunger. About half of the
world’s population live on less than $2.50 per day.
Household debt rates in much of the world have
increased astronomically – which implicates the
middle class into a debt-driven consumption
pattern. There are miserable implications for this
data – the fact that global wealth, drawn from the
exploitation of social labour, has been sequestered
by very small numbers of people; and that the
amelioration of suffering of a very large number
of people will be sporadic and insufficient.
Older categories that have been set aside by
social science – such as humiliation, frustration,
Working Document, No. 1
desolation, alienation, anger – will be needed if
we are to understand the condition in the planet
of slums. Rather than fight to break the tax
strike, the governments of the world turn their
energy towards corralling the masses through
devices of great ingenuity – a War on Drugs, a
War on Terror – with new vocabulary to suggest
the inevitability of the new mechanisms of
control – Security, Surveillance, Risk Mitigation,
Sensitivity Analysis, Hazards. Social wealth that
could be used to overcome poverty is now moved
29
– increasingly – to build up the arsenal of ‘security’.

A 2016 report from the Institute for Economics and

Neofascism
Peace showed that the total cost of violence per year
is about $13.6 trillion, with half of this ($6.6 trillion)
going to military expenditure and a quarter ($3.5
trillion) going to internal security. The total cost of
violence amounts to 13.3% of the world’s GDP. Since
the stated commitment for Official Development
Aid is merely 0.7% of GDP, this discrepancy between
aid and violence shows that the market has failed.
Neoliberal policy, which is essentially starvation of
the social side of state policy and indulgence of the
military side of state policy, has little answer to the
widening inequality gap and the deepening sense
of despair that grips large parts of the planet. Guns I just don’t want a poor person.
intimidate people but they do not provide them with —Donald Trump.
any hope for a better future.

Fixation on Donald Trump is a natural instinct.

He is the most bellicose of the strong men, a
long line that runs from the Philippines’ Rodrigo
Duterte through India’s Narendra Modi to
Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdogan. Of these men,
Trump is in charge of the most powerful state,
with vast military capabilities and with its power
coursing through the institutions of international
finance and diplomacy.

Trump – and the European neofascists – provides

Working Document, No. 1

a muted rhetorical opposition to neoliberalism.
They do not oppose neoliberal policy in any
direct way, since they remain committed to
policies that increase economic growth and to
policies that curtail the social wage. Substantial
critiques of globalisation are not to be found
at the policy level, but only at the rhetorical or
political level. It is here – in speeches before their
constituencies – that Trump and the neofascists
gesture towards policies of economic sovereignty.
They grumble about job loss and trade policies,

31
but – like neoliberals – they have no real alternative
to globalisation. They are trapped by its material
contradictions: immense profits harvested by
multinational corporations that feed the financial
structure; while great misery grows for the mass of the
world’s population, who produce the social wealth to
which they seem to have no claim.
Neofascism is the inverse of the psychic life of
neoliberalism. The general cultural atmosphere of
neoliberalism breeds the attitude that success is a
personal journey, that self-direction drives excellence
and wealth. This is the attitude of the novelist and
philosopher Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, from her
novel Fountainhead (1943), who believes that ‘second
handers’ must be shunned so that people of talent
and motivation – such as himself – can win. But
what happens to those who do not ‘win’, who cannot
‘succeed’, who find it hard to even live at the standard
they think is necessary for their desires? Failure cannot
be allowed to be personal, but nor is it understood in
structural terms. It is someone else – the scapegoat
– who is the reason for one’s failure, not one’s own
limitations or the barriers placed upon social advance
by the way the system is structured. Those who fail
by Ayn Rand’s rules look over their shoulders to find
someone to blame. It is, as Ernst Bloch wrote almost
a century ago, a ‘swindle of fulfilment’ – a false,
brutal community substitutes for a genuinely humane
community. If neoliberalism blames the individual for
‘failure’, neofascism blames the scapegoat.
What the neofascists promise is much weaker than
either economic sovereignty structured around nation-
states or around the working-class. Their rhetoric
sparkles with economic nationalism, but in fact their
policy provisions are stuck at the border of cultural
nationalism. They obsess over a fantasy of cultural
homogeneity – a Europe without minarets and hijabs,
an India without Muslims, the United States without
Mexicans. Anti-immigrant sentiment is the platform
of their nationalism. Trade ceases to be about the
principles of exchange and becomes increasingly
about racism. There is little serious conversation
here about how increased productivity rates in
the West – driven by technology – have been the
cause of job loss. Trade has played only a marginal
role in the haemorrhaging of ‘white collar’ jobs.
Serious economic discussion is by the wayside as
the antidote to suffering is suffocated by ‘Build
the Wall’ and ‘Muslim Ban’, ‘Beef Ban’ and the war
on ‘drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings’ –
slogans of great meaning to those who are hurt by
them, but with little meaning for those who suffer
from economic insecurity. This is the cruelty of
the neofascism, the dominant political form of
our times.
Ayn Rand’s children – those who believe that
they have succeeded – are now in charge, a great
buoyancy in Wall Street, the Finanzplatz, Dalal
Street, and in the City of London, a sense that tax
burdens will lessen even more and that liquidity
will allow far more wealth to be created in the
financial world than previously. The tax ‘reforms’
of the Trump administration are indicative of the
favouritism towards Ayn Rand’s children rather
than to the dispossessed populations. Wealth is
comfortable with neofascism, if a little embarrassed
by its cultural obscenity. The tax strike remains
sacrosanct. So is the investment strike. None of
Working Document, No. 1
this is under threat from the ‘nationalism’ of the
neofascists who are quite happy to turn their
attention against the vulnerable rather than the
propertied.
The neofascists are under no compulsion to mask
their belligerence, to hide behind phrases such as
‘humanitarian interventionism’ or ‘security’. They
believe in violence and want to use it in allopathic
doses to maintain their domination. Calls for re-
colonisation come alongside calls for the theft of
33
natural resources. Their wars – internal and external –
are the prophylaxis against the failure of their fantasy
of cultural sovereignty. They cannot make a world of
Imperialism
cultural homogeneity so they use force to intimidate
those who are seen as foreigners, as outsiders, as lesser
human beings.

When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force.

—Hugo Chávez.

Neither neoliberalism nor neofascism is capable of

moving a human agenda against the contradictions
produced by globalisation. People are being seen
as disposable, as a gated-community civilisation
grafts itself above society. It is a miserable world
that confronts us.

It is important to say directly that this new

architecture of production is maintained by
diplomatic and legal extortion as well as military
intimidation. When countries do not agree with
the institutional arrangements that benefit the

Working Document, No. 1

largely Northern-based multinational firms or if
policies move against property, the full force of the
corporate media and the military establishment of
the North are mobilised into action. The pressure
that runs from Venezuela to Iran to North Korea
is a visible demonstration of imperialism, namely
the extra-economic power used by states in an era
of hyper-monopoly arms-length capitalism.

In our current period, the United States

government has been the main gendarme for the

35
structure of imperialism. It links together a web of allies
that runs from the countries in the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO) and goes outwards to
important regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, India
and Colombia. The United States – and its European
allies – has to hold together an unsustainable set of
contradictions. The United States has made it clear
that it would not like to see any rivals challenge its
putative hegemony – with the main rivals in our time
being China and Russia. The World Economic Forum
estimates that in 2017 the United States had the largest
economy in the world ($18 trillion, just above 24% of
the size of the world economy), but that China is
next ($11 trillion, 14.84% of the world economy). IMF
data shows that the Chinese economy grew by 6.7% in
2016, while the US economy grew at a much slower
pace of 1.6%. A study by PricewaterhouseCooper
says that China will be the largest economy by 2050.
China, in other words, is poised to become the largest
economy in the world. Furthermore, China’s economy
dynamism is no longer to be based on low-wage work,
but on technology-driven productivity improvements.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation report
from 2016 showed that in the previous year, China had
filed the largest number of patent applications – twice
the number of applications filed by US-based entities.
China, in fact, filed a third of the world’s patent
applications in 2015. This suggests that China might
challenge the US and Western domination of the
intellectual property driven arms-length outsourcing
accumulation strategy.
If these rivals – China and Russia – emerge to
become powerful poles, then they would challenge
the three pillars of the Western advantaged system of
disarticulated production and global accumulation
of capital: arms-length outsourcing, intellectual
property rights and the use of violence by the West
for its own ends. There are small signs that these three
pillars are indeed being challenged. The first two are
certainly being undermined – although it would take
many decades before they can be totally set aside.
The third pillar – monopoly on force – is going
to be harder to shake. The United States, in 2016,
spent more than the next eight largest spenders
on arms combined (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia,
India, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and
Germany). At $611.2 billion, the United States
dwarfs the second largest spender, namely China,
which spent a mere $215,7 billion in comparison.
US President Donald Trump’s proposed increase
to the US military budget will add more to US
military spending than total spent by the third
largest spender, namely Russia, at $69.2 billion.
The United States also has a massive military
footprint with its eight hundred bases spread
over seventy countries. The United Kingdom,
France and Russia combined have a total of thirty
foreign bases. China has one foreign military base
– in Djibouti – in the shadow of a massive US
base in the same country. Russia’s military bases
are mainly in the former Soviet Union (mostly in
Central Asia), with two bases in the edges Asia
(Syria and Vietnam). There is no indication that
these powers – China and Russia – will be able
to challenge US military supremacy at any point.
At most, they will be able to halt the aggressive
behaviour of the United States to conduct regime
change operations, such as in Syria.
Despite their military weakness, these countries
Working Document, No. 1
cannot be easily be subordinated. Too much pressure
on them would turn them inwards, or towards
building their own networks of accumulation
outside the parameters of Western institutions.
China already through its Silk Road project and
its investments Africa as well as through its own
intellectual property developments is building a
production and accumulation architecture that
would undermine the disarticulate production
process that advantages Western firms. To push
too hard against China and Russia might move
37
China to slowly withdraw from the Western banking
system to park its surpluses elsewhere and to cease to
rely upon Western markets for sale of its products.
The contradiction between holding the rivals down
and making sure that they do not move outside the
orbit of the West is the complex task of modern-day
imperialism.
The use of force for economic ends is evident in
the expansion of NATO towards Russia and in the
encirclement of China. Hot conflicts in Ukraine and
North Korea and cold conflicts around the South
China Sea are the measure of these struggles. Neither
Russia nor China is willing to provide economic
advantages to the West. China is the nettle under
the saddle for the United States. Its trade surpluses
rankle. The behaviour of China as opposed to Japan
is instructive. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan’s trade
surpluses also bothered the United States. Japan’s
government twice allowed US political pressure to
revalue the Yen to the betterment of the Dollar (in
the 1985 Plaza Accord and the 1995 Reverse Plaza
Accord). When Japan’s people elected in a reform-
oriented government on a mandate to remove the US
base at Okinawa in 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton directly intervened to force the resignation of
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. It has not been so
easy to force China to revalue its currency and to allow
its political system to be dictated by Washington. It
has, therefore, been imperative to challenge China’s
use of the sea-lanes and to threaten its security with
military bases and over-flights. Much the same sort of
sabre-rattling is evident in the expansion of NATO
eastwards, breaking the minimal agreement between
the Soviets and the Germans for the absorption of
the newly unified Germany into NATO. Germany’s
foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told the
USSR’s foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, ‘We
are aware that NATO membership for a unified
Germany raises complicated questions. For us, one
thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east’.
But it has, and in doing so with an aggressive
missile defence shield, it has directly threatened
the security of Russia. The Ukraine crisis is a clear
consequence of the expansion of NATO into
Eastern Europe. NATO’s expansion into Eastern
Europe is not merely to protect the countries
along the Russian perimeter but to ensure that
these countries remain within the tentacles of a
Western-dominated political economy rather than
a Russian or Chinese one. The force of arms is the
iron fist inside the velvet glove of globalisation.
Behind doors, the Masters of the World – the G7
states – continue their shenanigans despite the
world financial crisis. Policy space is constrained
by them in international institutions, allowing
them latitude on subsidies but allowing the Global
South little freedom. The pressure on the Global
South against their food security requirements
is one such. Another is the Trade in Services
Agreement (TISA) pushed by the US and the
European Union and their ‘Really Good Friends’
(a strange term of art used by the US and the EU to
refer to the bloc they have put together). The bulk
of the Really Good Friends involved in the TISA
negotiations are from the upper income countries,
with only two lower income states (Pakistan and
Paraguay) in the process. The TISA pushes for the
privatisation of public services and for the control
Working Document, No. 1
over data by large corporations outside the
territories from which this data is harvested. The
point of the TISA agenda is to set aside the old
development project and to assert in its place an
‘e-commerce’ strategy to reduce poverty. A UBS
report suggested that the e-commerce agenda,
rather than end poverty, would exacerbate it. With
e-commerce, said the banking analysts, countries
in the Global South ‘will face the threat of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution, compromising low-
skilled jobs via extreme automation, but may not
39
have the technological ability to enjoy the relative gains
that could be re-distributed via extreme connectivity’.
What this means is that the digital colonialism will
give a handful of firms – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix
and Google (FANGs) – the power to provide services
across the planet, harvest data from this provision and
make efficiency gains that benefit capital but have a
negative impact on labour and society.
Alongside the TISA is the trade regime pushed by the
West on both flanks of Eurasia – the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) across the
Atlantic and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
(TPP) across the Pacific. Both the TTIP and TPP bind
countries to the Western networks of trade hegemony
and keep weaker countries out of the networks of
China and Russia. Both have been negotiated utterly
in secret and – if not for the occasional leak – the
entire content of the discussion would be unknown
to the public. Domestic laws would be set-aside
before the TTIP and TPP, where the North would
set an agenda for the rest of the ‘partners’. One of the
leaked documents suggests that the US is applying
‘great pressure’ on the countries to get through the
divergence of opinion on questions of intellectual
property. In the debate around investment, one of
the documents shows, ‘the United States has shown
no flexibility on its proposal’. The outcome of these
‘negotiations’ is typically a victory for the West.
Western pressure continues to be overwhelming. Its
rules will continue to subordinate the economies of
the South to Western advantage. Any trade rule that
weakens the intellectual property regime that benefits
the large monopoly rent-seeking firms of the West
will be rejected outright by the Western leadership.
This is the essence of imperialist pressure in trade
discussions.
US President Donald Trump has signed an executive
order to rip up the TPP. To see Trump’s rejection of
the TPP as a change in direction is an illusion. The
real issue of the TPP is not the trade rules itself,
but China and not even China, but the emergence
of rivals who can rewrite the trade rules and
produce new networks for global production
and accumulation. On October 5, 2015, former
US President Barack Obama said, ‘We can’t let
countries like China write the rules of the global
economy’. TPP was not the essence. It was the
isolation of China and the prevention of any
rival from writing the rules of the global order.
Trump has set a much harsher tone but says the
exact same thing. China, a sovereign country with
the second largest economy in the world, must
not be at the table when the ‘rules of the global
economy’ are written. This is the underlying floor
of imperialism. It must decide the rules.
Imperialism of the new era comes on two axes.
First, on the institutional front, the Global North
pushed a series of organisations, such as the WTO,
to provide the only forum for discussion of issues
of trade and development. At the same time, the
Global North subordinated older institutions,
such as the UN, to do its bidding in terms of use of
force. Second, on the ideological front, the Global
North argued against any alternative to the set of
policies that went by the name of neoliberalism.
Private sector led growth for private sector gains
were seen as the only logical path for development.
This, then, has been the new imperialism – so-
Working Document, No. 1
called globalised institutions that follow a
neoliberal policy platform even as the neofascists
moan about the threats to their culture.
By the 2000s, the first major challenge at the
inter-state level to the new imperialism emerged.
In 2003, many states in the UN questioned the
US desire to extend its warfare in Iraq while the
emergent states at a WTO meeting in Cancun
41
blocked the Global North’s agenda for intellectual
property. These two developments – among others –
provided the basis for the emergence of the BRICS
(Brazil-Russia-China-India-South Africa) project.
What was the BRICS bloc in its early stage? It was
not an anti-imperialist platform. An anti-imperialist
platform would have required the BRICS bloc to
take on imperialism both at the institutional and
ideological level. The BRICS grouping was merely
an institutional challenge to ‘unipolarity’, a move by
major states to craft a multi-polar world.
BRICS has certainly attempted a new institutional
foundation beside that of the Global North – the
New Development Bank against the World Bank;
the Contingency Reserve Arrangement against the
IMF; the demand for permanent seats for the BRICS
states on the UN Security Council. There is talk of
a Southern ratings agency against the hegemony of
Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poors. There is also
talk of other currencies to denominate inter-state
trade. Least convincingly, the BRICS has begun a
conversation toward the creation of a new security
architecture.
But the BRICS bloc – given the nature of its ruling
classes (and particularly with the right now in
ascendency in Brazil and in India) – has no ideological
alternative to imperialism. The domestic policies
adopted by the BRICS states can be described as
neoliberal with southern characteristics – with a focus
on sales of commodities, low wages to workers along
with the recycled surplus turned over as credit to the
North, even as the livelihood of their own citizens
is jeopardised, and even as they have developed new
markets in other, often more vulnerable, countries
which were once part of the Third World bloc. There
is little argument within the BRICS to defend food
sovereignty or the right to food, to create decent jobs
against hoarded wealth, and to fight against the power
of the bankers. In fact, the new institutions of the
BRICS will be yoked to the IMF and the dollar –
not willing to create a new platform for trade and
development apart from the Northern order. The
Contingency Reserve Arrangement will continue
to rely upon IMF surveillance and IMF agreements
as a way to measure its own lending. The dollar
is omnipresent in these mechanisms. Eagerness
for Western markets continues to dominate the
growth agenda of the BRICS states. The immense
needs of their own populations do not drive their
policy orientations.
Finally, the BRICS project has no ability to
counter the military dominance of the US and
NATO. When the UN votes to allow ‘member
states to use all necessary measures’, as it did in
Resolution 1973 on Libya, it essentially gives carte
blanche to the Atlantic world to act with military
force. There are no regional alternatives that have
the capacity to operate on such UN resolutions.
The Russian military interventions into Crimea in
2014 and into Syria in 2015 are indications that US
military uni-polarity might be slightly weakened,
but not at an end. The US is a global force with
bases on every continent and with the ability to
strike almost anywhere. Regional mechanisms for
peace and conflict-resolution are weakened by the
global presence of NATO and the United States’
war machine. Overwhelming military power
translates into political power. BRICS have few
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means, at this time, to challenge that power.
Russian and Chinese alliances across Eurasia
on security and economic lines are not signs
of the creation of an alternative pole to
Western imperialism. They are merely signs of
defensiveness against imperialist aggression, with
sanctioned Russia seeking shelter in the Chinese
surpluses and with Chinese caution being given
some boost by Russian confidence. The Russian-
Chinese naval exercises during the 2017 US-North
43
Korean standoff and the entry of Russian forces into
West Asia, backed by China, is a sign that they will
not allow complete US domination – as has been the
case from 1991 to the present. What they are jockeying
for is to protect their sovereignty and the zone of
influence around their territory – not for competition
around the globe against US imperialist power.
What we have rather than an inter-imperialist conflict
is an inter-capitalist conflict, with the BRICS states
– mainly China – pushing for market share across
the world and pushing back a weakened Western
economic bloc. Tensions between Trump’s America
First policy and the political-economic order that
has relied on the vast pools of labour brought into
the capitalist orbit since the 1990s has led the inter-
capitalist crisis to take on inter-state dimensions.
Western fantasies of Chinese domination go back a
decade at least, when Chinese – and other – surpluses
bailed out the Western financial order from collapse.
But those fantasies were not always translated from
rhetoric to policy. The danger now is that policies
might appear that would confound the system as it
operates. China’s premier Xi Jinping put it plainly
at the 2017 Davos meeting, ‘No one will emerge as a
winner in a trade war’. What he meant is not merely a
trade war but an inter-state conflict with confounding
outcomes. As inter-capitalist rivalries accelerate the
tendency towards inter-state – and in time, to inter-
imperialist – conflict should not be underestimated.
Imperialism continues to structure the world order –
but it no longer appears as either raw colonialism or as
mid-20th century style neo-colonialism. Matters are
more complex. Here are six contours of 21st century
imperialism:
(1) To maintain the alliance system, with the
United States as the hub and its secondary allies
(the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan
and others) as its spokes. At the outer edge of its
spokes are subsidiary allies, such as Colombia,
India, Israel and Saudi Arabia. These allies are
essential to the global reach of US power. Any
challenge to the allies will be swiftly put down
by the full force of the United States military
and with the open pipeline of military
equipment and training from the Atlantic
powers to their subsidiary allies.
(2) To ensure that no challenge to the alliance
system is allowed to emerge. The end of the
Cold War signalled the demise of the main
threat to the alliance – the Soviet Union and
its satellites. Since then, the United States and
its confederates have made sure to squeeze
dry any challenge to the system. Pressure has
built up on China and Russia through the
expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and
with the build-up of US forces in the Pacific
Rim region. South America’s emergence had
to be cut down, whether through the old
fashioned coups (as in Honduras) or through
post-modern coups (as in Brazil). BRICS,
ALBA, or any other alphabet soup that
sought an alternative power base had to be
disaggregated.
(3) To ensure that US confidence remain at a
high note. During the first Gulf War of 1990-
91, US President G. H. W. Bush said that the
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‘Vietnam syndrome’ had been quelled. The
US now felt confidence once more to act as
a major power on the world stage – unafraid
of exercising its full force. Proxy wars of the
1980s could be set aside. The US could now
act with full spectrum domination against
its adversaries. Calls for ‘another American
century’ resounded after the US war on Iraq in
2003. – there was a fear that the imbroglio in
Iraq would heighten doubts about US power.
This had to be squashed. It was important to
45
revive anew the self-image of the United States
as primus inter pares – the first amongst equals,
the ‘indispensable power’ as US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright put it. Threats against Iran
and North Korea are visible depictions of this
bluster.
(4) To protect the global commodity chain, which
is the basis for industrial production – whose
benefits are secured by transnational corporations
based in the Global North. Disaggregated
production sites (with factories spread across
nations) and stringent intellectual property
laws enable these corporations to have much
more power along this global commodity chain
than workers’ organisations and nation-states.
Diplomatic and military power of the Global
North’s alliance system is used against policies
of nationalisation and the intellectual commons.
Sub-contracted mechanisms of labour discipline
allow the Global North to maintain high moral
standards while they rely entirely upon brutal
work conditions that render social relations toxic.
(5) To guarantee the safe passage of extracted
raw materials from mines and wells at rates far
below what might be paid to the people who are
the guardians of that wealth. Environmentally
deleterious and inhumane practices of extraction
are hidden away in forests and deserts, where
protests will be fought in the name of the War
on Terror or the War on Drugs or some kind
of war that allows the extraction to take place
without threat. Both the subsidiary partners of
the Global North and the emergent states rely
upon exports of raw materials for their growth
agendas, allowing the Global North to wash its
hands off the harshness that takes place in the
dark – outside its direct control.
(6) To secure the financial power of the Global
North, whether by protecting Saudi Arabia’s
royal family so as to secure the flow of petro-
dollars to the North’s banks or by making
sure that debts taken by the countries of the
poor are paid up in full. When the financial
crisis struck the Atlantic world, the Global
North begged the large states of Asia (China,
India and Indonesia) to provide liquidity to
the system. In exchange, the Global North
promised to shut down its executive – the
Group of Seven (G7) – and substitute it
with the Group of Twenty (G20). After the
banks recovered, that promise was forgotten.
Financial power had to been restored. That
was the bottom line.
The challenge from the BRICS has now largely
been muted. This has a great deal to do with its
own internal contradictions, the rise of the right to
power in Brazil and India as well as the rightward
drift in South Africa, and the lowered commodity
prices that struck at the heart of the BRICS
economic power. The BRICS have failed – for now
– to rebalance the world order. It was left to two
of its members – Russia and China – to produce
a modest challenge to Western imperialism.
Squeezed on the two flanks of Eurasia by military
manoeuvres and by Western threats against Iran
and North Korea as well as by sanctions on Russia
for its intervention in Crimea, the Russians and
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Chinese signed economic and commercial deals
as well as military and strategic agreements. The
economic and commercial ties – particularly for
the sales of energy – remain, however, modest.
Chinese and Russian naval manoeuvres off the
coast of North Korea and the entry of Chinese
warships into the Mediterranean near Russian
ships are signals that they will not easily allow
the West to use its force to fashion a world to its
advantage. But these are defensive postures, not
capable fully of rebalancing the world order let
47
alone providing an alternative to this order. Whether Part 2: Agency.
they will be able to sustain their defensive attempt
in this time of neofascism is hard to say: will Russian
and Chinese aircraft land in Tehran and Pyongyang to Decomposition of
prevent regime change in these two borderline states
of Eurasia? the Agent of
History

General, your tank is a strong vehicle.

It breaks down a forest and crushes a hundred people.

Working Document, No. 1

But it has one fault: it needs a driver.
—Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer.

What remains before us? Across the planet, there

are many strong and powerful movements of the
people – labour struggles and dignity struggles,
fights to defend the right to natural resources and
fights to defend the rights to one’s body. These are
the main avenues of resistance to the powerful.

49
For a hundred years, factories and offices drew in
large numbers of workers in a dense environment
of surveillance and productivity. Capital, hungry for
profit, saw the advantages of creating gargantuan
factories and offices. The scale of production
benefitted capital – by making enormous numbers of
commodities, capital could bid down the price of raw
materials and saturate the market with its volume.
Smaller firms went out of business. The craft of work
vanished slowly, as the workers had to take their place
in endless lines of production, where they expended
their energy on smaller and smaller tasks that added
up – outside their control – into the commodity.
No worker made the entire commodity, but all the
workers – combined – produced the commodity.
This made individual workers into ‘an appendage
of a machine’, as Marx wrote in Capital (1867). The
intellectual demands on the workers fell, as artisans
saw their skill taken over by the assembly line and the
machine. The life of workers became indebted to the
factory, and the working-class found itself dragged –
as Marx wrote – ‘beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut
of capital’.
The advantage of capital soon became its disadvantage.
Having large numbers of workers consolidated in one
factory allowed them to converse with each other.
They would deliberate about their problems and
consider how to understand the collapse of their
dignity. It is in these conversations and the actions
that the modern trade union movement developed.
Factories were the centres of them because these were
the places where the workers had density. They were
also traps for capital – money had been invested in
them, and any second of wastage would produce losses
to the bosses. It meant that if the workers could strike
work, then they would put capital under pressure.
During this period, in Great Britain for instance, the
bulk of the wageworkers were not employed in the
factories; they were in domestic service. But domestic
servants did not have the advantage of being in one
factory, where they could organise together and
where their strike would put pressure on capital.
If a domestic servant protested, he or she would
be fired. It was harder to fire an entire workforce
in a factory. That is why factories became the hub
of the trade union movement, and it is why the
Marxists and socialists saw the trade unions as the
centre of the socialist future. It also reveals how
the sexism of parts of the trade union movement
was reproduced in the strategy of industrial
unionism: the majority of the working-class,
difficult to organise because they were scattered
in the homes of the propertied, were outside the
hegemony of the working-class organisations.
By the mid-20th century, a hundred years after
the trade union movement and its gains, capital
had recourse to new methods of exploitation. We
entered the era – as we have seen – of disarticulated
production. Smaller factories no longer have the
kind of worker density that large ones do. If a
commodity is being built across national lines, it
advantages capital against nations – governments
of the people find it hard to nationalise a factory
since they would only be able to nationalise one
part of the production chain. The commodity
chain revokes the strategy of nationalisation.
The disarticulation of production makes trade
unionism difficult, because capital now says that
if you strike in one factory, then they will close
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you down and move production elsewhere. Their
investment is no longer as trapped as it used to
be. Since a great deal of production is outsourced
to small capitalists in distant lands, the monopoly
firms think nothing of abandoning one supplier
for another in a different country. Their loyalty
to their supplier is zero. In other words, the new
techniques of production have disadvantaged
trade unionism. It is also in these new, smaller,
scattered factories that women workers have
become such a crucial entity – brought in for less
51
than a decade of their lives, worn out by the speed-
up of the factory floor and then sent back to their
rural lives from where they came – waste products of
contemporary capitalism.
With workers traveling for insecure jobs, the question
of the working day has now been elongated such that
leisure time is minimal if not non-existent, and so the
time required to build the bulwarks of the working-
class and peasantry has been eaten away. This time of
the commute has eaten into the time of the community
and the time of the union. Social life has been frayed
as time has been stolen from people not by employers
alone, but by the structure of insecurity and part-time
work. More time is often spent in search of work than
in work itself.
Furthermore, the culture of unionism has taken a
beating before the culture of commodities. People
have increasingly been converted by a fierce blast
from the media, from the advertising industry and
from educational institutions from workers into
consumers. That is, the new identity – worn down
by the psychic life of neoliberalism – is not to be
seen in relation to one’s workplace, but to one’s
consumption patterns. Malls and advertisements
attract people of many classes to imagine themselves
as someone else. If not malls, then religious halls –
temples, mosques, churches – have become once more
salves for displaced informal workers, whose beaten
bodies and consciousness is now redeemed through
the salvation promised by preachers of different
faiths. Pentecostalism in Latin America, Protestant
Christianity in China and so on have doggedly made
their presence felt where union and socialist culture
once held sway. Communities are created around
desire for commodities and around faith. These have
become more appealing in many quarters than the
culture of the union and of socialist societies.
Trade unionism, in this context is made to seem
anachronistic. It is portrayed in the mainstream
as yesterday’s culture, with its slogans depicted
as reminiscent of the days without malls and
advertisements. But this is not all, since even
more general sentiments of unity – such as
nationalism and patriotism – have been eroded.
They are becoming merely lifestyles, not
meaningful cultural attributes. One can claim to
be a nationalist without having any commitment
to the people who make up the nation. The sharp
edge of nationalism rubs hard against dissent.
Crying sedition has become the order of the day.
Students, journalists, workers, peasants, women
– anyone who wants to suggest that there are
problems with the national ‘consensus’ is seen
as alien to the nation. The ‘nationalism’ that
is acceptable is a hateful, unthinking form of
social cohesion that does not require the work
of building society, but instead is premised on
violence and anti-social activity.
Structural unemployment and the widened
informal sector channel grievances out of the
workplace and into the streets. Survival in these
streets leads to activity that could be seen as illegal –
whether in the trade in drugs, sex, weapons or even
barter. The existence of these activities provides
the state with the opportunity to go to war against
the population. The character of the state tends
more to security than to welfare, to the policing of
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the population rather than to its care. Ideologies
that argue for a smaller state (neoliberalism) have
no problem with an expanded state apparatus for
security. The calculus between desperation and
revolution was clear to the elite. Tom Clausen of
Bank of America is exemplary, ‘When people are
desperate, you have revolutions. It’s in our own
evident self-interest to see that they are not forced
into that. You must keep the patient alive, because
otherwise you can’t effect the cure’. To prevent
the journey to revolution, only two paths lay
53
open to the elite – concessions to prevent the worst
effects of neoliberal policy (which was the character Recomposition of
of liberalism) or harsh security measures to crush the
spirit of revolt (which was the character of fascism). the Agent of
But, in fact, in our times only one path opens up as
neoliberalism and neofascism find common cause –
namely, to send in the riot police. The gap narrows
History
between the force of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian
intervention’, between the global commodity chains
that wrap around the world and regime change wars
that break states to create chaos. Force is, Marx wrote
in 1867, ‘itself an economic power’.

Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo.

They are afraid of us because we are not afraid of
them.
­—Berta Cáceres.

What does the Left movement do today as it is

confronted by the disarticulation of production, the
culture of consumerism and the rise of the Security

Working Document, No. 1

state? There are no easy answers, but there are
essential questions. There can be no full revival of
trade union power without a revival of the culture
of workers. There can be no easy revival of trade
union power without an acknowledgment of the
disarticulation of production, and the need –
therefore – to build worker power where workers
live if it is not always possible to organise them
where they work. The point is to build worker
power, not only factory power. Great social and
economic changes are afoot beneath our feet,

55
which will drive frustration and anger amongst
workers. It is the role of the sentinels of the workers
– the unions and parties – to be prepared when these
waves break out, when the objective conditions of
distress lead to the subjective eruption of protest. For
that reason, the recomposition of the working-class
and the peasantry is of the essence.
The promise of trade unionism is to build worker
power. To build worker power does not mean to only
build unions in the workplace, notably in factories
and in the fields. There is no doubt that it remains
important to organise workers into unions. But the
difficulties in many sectors – notably in the small
manufacturing outfits in Export Processing Zones
and the home-based work – means that other, creative
means must be deployed to organise workers. For
example, some of the most dynamic organising work
around the world has happened in the places where
workers live, as they fight to survive against rising
prices for essential items, including water, and as they
fight to produce spaces of safety for their families.
Such battles – over water and over public spaces –
have galvanised workers and peasants around notions
of the ‘community’ or the ‘neighbourhood’, terms
that do not on the surface have a class connotation
but certainly do so when one approaches them from a
materialist perspective. After all, the ‘community’ that
the workers of Cochabamba (Bolivia), organised by
trade unionists, defended during the ‘water wars’ was
not an abstraction, but it was the concrete community
of workers whose lives were being torn apart by
privatisation. They knew that their community was
a tangible fact in their lives, the solidarity that they
needed to fight against water privatisation and the
social bonds that they needed to hold fast to and
rebuild for survival in the protracted struggles ahead.
Experiences of South Africa’s Abahlali baseMjondolo
(AbM or the Shack Dwellers) and Brazil’s Movement
dos Trabalhadores See Terra (MST or the Landless
Workers Movement) as well as that of the
Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI)
as well as the All-India Democratic Women’s
Association (AIDWA) – both mass organisations
of the Indian communist movement – show the
efficacy of building worker and peasant power in
the areas where workers and peasants live. Slums
are the homes of the workers and peasants of our
time. These are congested areas, with minimal
state support. UN Habitat estimates that a fourth
of the world’s population lives in slums. In some
cities of the Global South, half the population
live in slums, where there is inadequate shelter,
lack of clean water, poor sanitation and little if
no health and education facilities. The figures
from international agencies seem deflated. For
instance, the slum of Khayelitsha in Cape Town
(South Africa) is said to have 400,000 residents,
although those who work in the slum say that
the actual population is at least three times this
number. Dharavi in Mumbai (India) houses
somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million
people, while that of Ciudad Neza in Mexico City
(Mexico) houses a million people. The largest slum
in the world is said to be Orangi Town in Karachi
(Pakistan), which houses over 2.5 million people. In
these slums live people who work in the informal
sector – in some countries measuring close to the
totality of the workforce (India’s informal sector,
for instance, is 90% of the workforce). These
Working Document, No. 1
working-class populations are outside the social
regulations of state-driven labour policy and they
are – often – outside the network of trade unions.
Social wealth does not trickle down to these places.
The good side of the state is largely absent here.
As a result the workers in these areas rely upon
(a) their own ingenuity and self-organisation; (b)
the markets produced by gangsters of one kind or
another as well as of religious orders and NGOs;
(c) the invisible heart of the women amongst
57
the workers, whose fight to protect the integrity of
their families moves them to great efforts of social
reproduction. The first practice demonstrates the
possibility of socialism. It is here that one sees the
formation of cooperatives and self-help groups by
the working-class and for the working-class. The
second is the most important challenge, since it is
here that religious organisations and the mafia dig
their own tentacles deep into working-class life. They
– including NGOs – are a structural impediment to
the growth of the Left. But the Left has learned that
it will not grow merely by challenging these entities
frontally. Experiences from across the Global South
show us that the Left will have to prove by its work
in the arena of social reproduction that it is indeed
a better alternative to religious and charitable
organisations as well as the mafia. Left organisations
are already working to create platforms to assist the
working-class in its fights for water and electricity,
housing and street services, schools and healthcare –
but at the same time working alongside the working-
class as it begins to deliver these services in a relatively
autonomous fashion. This is dangerous activity. It
means undermining the gangs, the religious groups
and the NGOs – all of whom have great stakes in this
kind of work. At the same time, the intervention of
the Left into these spaces socialises the privatised
labour of social reproduction largely done by women.
A great deal of work will need to be done to build
the institutions of social reproduction amongst the
workers and peasants, and a great deal of work will need
to be done by intellectuals to study these initiatives,
write about them to share them in different settings
and to exchange the best experiences and outcomes
that have emerged from this popular energy.
Furthermore, working-class power, in our period, is
being built with great energy against the social divides
of gender, religious and other types of hierarchies and
discriminations. Marxists often used to worry that
these divides of social hierarchy might ‘split’ working-
class unity; in fact, these divides in society have
already sundered unity and further the neglect
of these issues only exacerbates disunity and
distrust. The struggle for dignity by workers and
peasants is not something outside class politics.
It is precisely the essence of a class politics
that wishes to liberate us from oppression and
exploitation and redeem us as full human beings.
Workers and peasants cannot be powerful unless
they are united. The 180 million workers in India
– under the flag of the trade union movement
– who went on strike in September 2016 did so
because the issues on the table included political
questions of social division, including the division
between unionised workers in the formal sector
and non-unionised workers in the informal sector
(many of them women, such as those workers in
public health and early childhood education jobs).
These workers showed that central to the building
of working-class and peasant power is the fight
against social hierarchies, religious sectarianism
and misogyny.
A major constraint to the building of worker power
has been the overwhelming bourgeois-dominated
culture of commodities that proliferates the idea
of people as consumers. This cultural push, driven
by the corporate media and by the urgency of
advertising, undermines notions of history and
collectivity – with history reduced to emblems
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for the sale of goods, and with history elevated
from the collective struggles of the popular classes
to the intervention of individuals. These ideas
are firmly inserted in the media and in academic
discourses, where there is a broad hesitation to
admit the importance of popular action in the
making of history and where there is a general
sentiment that transformative change is perhaps
neither desirable nor possible. What this implies
is that there is a need for a cultural struggle to
enrich the reservoirs of Left history, to emphasise
59
and illuminate the worker and peasant contribution
to the world. Young people no longer learn about the
Left in a robust way. The fight to introduce the history
of the Left and of workers and peasants into the
imagination of the youth is essential, not tangential,
to any struggle to rebuild Left strength. Sympathetic
intellectuals will need to make connections to popular
movements to help drive this agenda.
The debate over ideas, in other words, is a central
front for the movements of hope and possibility. A
corporate-driven media, for instance, operated within
a regime of truth that promotes the view that the West
is benevolent when it bombs countries and when
it pushes trade policies that destroy the agriculture
in countries. When the United States military kills
civilians in Afghanistan or Somalia, it is treated as
an accident; when a government that is treated as a
problem kills a civilian, it is seen as essential to the
character of that country or civilisation. If a Western-
driven trade policy ends up destroying cotton
production in Mali, this is seen as a necessary effect
of the laws of nature; when a country that is treated
as a problem makes an error in economic policy, it
is seen as the result of a failed model. Control of the
narrative of history is one problem, but control over
media representations of the present is another. A
narrow, sclerotic corporate-driven media – whether
CNN International or Globo – is saturated with
an ideological framework that sees Western-driven
regime change wars as acceptable and Western-driven
trade policies as inevitable. To push back against the
institutional control of this media and its ideological
framework as well as to provide alternative networks
for the traffic in emancipatory information is crucial.
What is the task of the socialist intellectual
alongside the work being done by the political and
social movements of the people? In an earlier era,
it was considered straightforward that the socialist
intellectuals would learn from the movements, would
see what kind of alternatives the movements
proposed and to build these gestures from the
movements into a full-fledged theory of the future.
This stance of the socialist intellectual is now no
longer self-evident. Many socialist intellectuals –
for various reasons – find themselves at a distance
from movements. This is for a host of reasons:
the embourgeoisement of the intellectual class
(both the media intellectuals and the academics),
the decomposition of the movements and the
adoption of the idea that major change is simply
not possible and the embarrassment in the post-
modern era of taking a strong stand in favour of
values seen to be ungrounded and contingent.
Nonetheless, there are millions of intellectuals
around the world who have not been impacted by
these developments but continue to have strong
ties to movements and continue to play vital
roles with the movements. One of the tasks of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is to
bring these intellectuals together across national
boundaries and to inspire – by their work –
others to join in projects that are done in close
association with social and political movements
towards emancipatory ends.
If we look closely at our movements we will find
that they want to bring macro-economic policy
under democratic control, they want to increase
social wages, they want to build infrastructure to
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attend to popular needs, they want to break the
tax strike of corporations and the elite, they want
convert banks from private entities into utilities,
they want to ensure a livelihood for everyone and
for housing for all. Here are elements of a future.
It is up to intellectuals to take these ideas and
stimulate debates around them. It is important
that we nourish an intellectual platform for
an alternative social, cultural, economic and
political order drawn from the experience of the
movements themselves. It is important, equally,
61
to recover two ideas that have been eroded by the
onslaught of bourgeois ideology – socialist ideas of
the human and of the future.
The culture of commodities and the idea of people
as consumers has desiccated the idea of the human.
Bolivian socialists have looked deeply into their
own traditions and elaborated a vocabulary to talk
about human character, of a human society that
is not subsumed by capitalist social norms. David
Choquehuanca, the executive secretary of the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas
(ALBA), speaks of Qhapag ñan, the path of the good
life, with the need to create not consumers and owners,
but iyambae, a person without an owner. Being a
person without an owner is, as Choquehuanca says,
‘the future, the path of people who look for the good
life’. Such efforts to revive the idea of the human – and
to revive ideas of the need to tend to the creation of
a human community – requires a great deal of effort,
effort already apparent in the mass movements which
struggle against the reduction of human decision
making to the logic of the double-entry account book.
As socialist intellectuals, it is important that we
recover the very idea that the present is not eternal
and that a transformation is possible. The possibility
of such a transformation is nothing other than the
idea of the future. There is no debate amongst us over
the existence of a past and of a present. These are self-
evident terms. But there is a debate about the future.
We know that tomorrow will come and then the day
after and then next month and then next year. But
this is seen as merely sequential time – as the present
stretching outwards. But this is not the idea of the
future. If there is a common sense idea of the future,
it has been seized by technology – technology, not
human character, has become the idea of the future.
It is imagined in our period that new technological
breakthroughs will be able to solve our social crises
– new green technologies to liberate us from climate
change, new digital and nano-technologies
to liberate us from economic stagnation.
Technological determinism has meant that the
problems that sit athwart the dreams of billions of
people have no social or political barriers; they are
entirely technical. This is a narrow idea of history
and of the future. Certainly some technological
developments will be essential for a better world,
but technology itself will not shape history. Older,
inherited hierarchies of wealth and power will
need to be confronted before these technological
breakthroughs can have a positive social impact
and not merely provide greater and greater wealth
and power to those at the top of the inherited
hierarchies.
A rich idea of the future requires us to imagine
that the present is not going to be eternal.
Transformations are possible, new solutions to
current problems are necessary, new horizons
must be built. These solutions will come from
people who know – in their bones – that the
social organisation of our society is inadequate
to our hopes and dreams. Our movements give us
an indicator of these horizons. We have to make
sure our social sciences are not dulled into the
cynicism of the impossible.
Working Document, No. 1
63
The organised bestiality of our times, with food
denied to people and weapons sold with eagerness to
nations who have only scarce public resources, comes
with little condemnation. Cynicism and nihilism is
the order of the day. This opens the door to a blasé
attitude towards the idea of humanity, of the necessary
effort it takes to produce human freedom. All known
traditions of humanity seem to be under great threat.
Concepts such as democracy, peace and culture have
been worn thin. They mean so little, often a fragile
shell of the powerful ideas that they could become.
It is clear to us that something in our world is dying.
What is not so clear is what is being born as the
replacement of the old.

Thirty million people are currently on the threshold

of famine. They would like to flee towards food and
away from drought, forest fires and war. Squeezed
between the end of livelihood and the refusal to allow
migration, the world’s poor experience punishment
for a crime that is unknown. What did they do to
deserve their fate? Why are they being punished when
they have not committed a crime?

Working Document, No. 1

65
Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the
author of twenty-five books and the editor of twenty
others. Among these books are The Poorer Nations:
A Possible History of the Global South and The Darker
Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. He writes
regularly for Frontline and The Hindu (India), Alternet
(USA) and BirGün (Turkey). He is the Chief Editor of
LeftWord Books (New Delhi).
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Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research is an
international, movement-driven
institution focused on stimulating
intellectual debate that serves
people’s aspirations.

Tricontinental. Instituto de
Investigación Social es una
institución promovida por los
movimientos, dedicada a estimular
el debate intelectual al servicio de
las aspiraciones del pueblo.

the